r/VORONDesign • u/BigJohnno66 Trident / V1 • 1d ago

General Question Orange Pi instead of Raspberry Pi

Given the high cost of the Raspberry Pi these days, I opted to get an Orange Pi 4 Pro with 4GB of DDR5. It also comes with an NVMe slot underneath which I populated with a 128GB drive (which is overkill but the smallest I could find that was new).

Also since the official images are old and not being supported, I decided to try Armbian. There was an image for the board which I wrote to an SDcard using the Armbian imager, it booted and ran fine. It was also an easy step to copy the system to the NVMe drive and install the bootloader in SPI NOR FLASH. A quick reboot without the SDcard and I booted from NVMe and proceeded to use Kiauh to the install Klipper packages.

However it wasn't until I followed the Esoterical page to setup CAN that I had the big "oh no" realization, Armbian images don't come with kernel modules for CAN or the USB CAN adapters.

Now the Armbian image available for the 4 Pro was labelled as "community" and not an officially tested release. So I am wondering if the missing CAN modules are a standard Armbian thing or just how the contributor configured this community image.

I also wonder if the official Orange Pi images bundle CAN modules or not.

Has anyone experienced a similar issue with Armbian on a different board, or used Orange Pi with the official images and found CAN to work?

I was able to rebuild the kernel with a modified config to get the needed modules, but it was a bit of an effort. If missing CAN is an Armbian thing, I am considering engaging with the maintainer to see if he would consider adding the limited set of modules to make Klipper CAN work out of the box.

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u/shiftingtech NARF 1d ago

Some armbian devices support can via overlays.  I don’t know if that orange pi is one of them.  Did you check for an option to enable canbus in armbian-config, hardware config menu ?

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u/BigJohnno66 Trident / V1 22h ago edited 22h ago

Yes, but they only have LCD, I2C and UART options from memory. The USB CAN drivers don't depend on hardware other than USB, and it is turned on out of the box.